Exploring Cooperative Societies: Ownership, Types, and Impact

What Is a cooperative society ? A cooperative (also co-operative or co-op) is a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit. [1] A cooperative is defined by the International Cooperative Alliance's Statement on the Cooperative Identity as "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise". [2] A cooperative may also be defined as a business owned and controlled equally by the people who use its services or by the people who work there.

Origins

In 2001, it merged with 11 cooperative federations which had been its main suppliers for over 100 years. [citation needed] As of 2005, Coop operates 1,437 shops and employs almost 45,000 people. According to Bio Suisse, the Swiss organic producers' association, Coop accounts for half of all the organic food sold in Switzerland. [citation needed] Euro Coop is the European Community of Consumer Cooperatives. [edit] Business and employment cooperative Main article: Business and employment co-operative Business and employment cooperatives (BECs) are a subset of worker ooperatives that represent a new approach to providing support to the creation of new businesses.

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Like other business creation support schemes, BECs enable budding entrepreneurs to experiment with their business idea while benefiting from a secure income. The innovation BECs introduce is that once the business is established the entrepreneur is not forced to leave and set up independently, but can stay and become a full member of the cooperative. The micro-enterprises then combine to form one multi-activity enterprise whose members provide a mutually supportive environment for each other.

BECs thus provide budding business people with an easy transition from inactivity to self-employment, but in a collective framework. They open up new horizons for people who have ambition but who lack the skills or confidence needed to set off entirely on their own – or who simply want to carry on an independent economic activity but within a supportive group context. New generation cooperative New generation cooperatives (NGCs) are an adaptation of traditional cooperative structures to modern, capital intensive industries. They are sometimes described as a hybrid between traditional co-ops and limited liability companies.

They were first developed in California and spread and flourished in the US Mid-West in the 1990s. [26] They are now common in Canada where they operate primarily in agriculture and food services, where their primary purpose is to add value to primary products. For example producing ethanol from corn, pasta from durum wheat, or gourmet cheese from goat’s milk. [27] Types of cooperative Housing cooperative [pic] [pic] Co-op City in New York is the largest cooperative housing development in the world with 55,000 people. [28] Main article: Housing cooperative

A housing cooperative is a legal mechanism for ownership of housing where residents either own shares (share capital co-op) reflecting their equity in the cooperative's real estate, or have membership and occupancy rights in a not-for-profit cooperative (non-share capital co-op), and they underwrite their housing through paying subscriptions or rent Housing cooperatives come in three basic equity structures[citation needed]: • In Market-rate housing cooperatives, members may sell their shares in the cooperative whenever they like for whatever price the market will bear, much like any other residential property.

Market-rate co-ops are very common in New York City. • Limited equity housing cooperatives, which are often used by affordable housing developers, allow members to own some equity in their home, but limit the sale price of their membership share to that which they paid. • Group equity or Zero equity housing cooperatives do not allow members to own equity in their residences and often have rental agreements well below market rates. Main article: Building cooperative Members of a building cooperative (in Britain known as a self-build housing cooperative) pool resources to build housing, normally using a high proportion of their own labour.

When the building is finished, each member is the sole owner of a homestead, and the cooperative may be dissolved. [citation needed] This collective effort was at the origin of many of Britain's building societies, which however developed into "permanent" mutual savings and loan organisations, a term which persisted in some of their names (such as the former Leeds Permanent). Nowadays such self-building may be financed using a step-by-step mortgage which is released in stages as the building is completed. [citation needed] The term may also refer to worker cooperatives in the building trade. citation needed] Utility cooperative Main article: Utility cooperative A utility cooperative is a type of consumers' cooperative that is tasked with the delivery of a public utility such as electricity, water or telecommunications services to its members. Profits are either reinvested into infrastructure or distributed to members in the form of "patronage" or "capital credits", which are essentially dividends paid on a member's investment into the cooperative. In the United States, many cooperatives were formed to provide rural electrical and telephone service as part of the New Deal.

See Rural Utilities Service. In the case of electricity, cooperatives are generally either generation and transmission (G&T) co-ops that create and send power via the transmission grid or local distribution co-ops that gather electricity from a variety of sources and send it along to homes and businesses. [29] In Tanzania, it has been proven that the cooperative method is helpful in water distribution. When the people are involved with their own water, they care more because the quality of their work has a direct effect on the quality of their water.

A remarkable development has taken place in Poland, where the SKOK (Spoldzielcze Kasy Oszczednosciowo-Kredytowe) network has grown to serve over 1 million members via 13,000 branches, and is larger than the country’s largest conventional bank. [ In Scandinavia, there is a clear distinction between mutual savings banks (Sparbank) and true credit unions (Andelsbank). [ The oldest cooperative banks in Europe, based on the ideas of Friedrich Raiffeisen, are joined together in the 'Urgenossen'. Federal or secondary cooperatives Main article: Cooperative Federation